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Rh the voyage around them. Those who had visited them had found them intensely cold and uninhabited, the surface very desolate, having no timber or firewood, and no vegetable excepting a few Arctic plants.

In the year 1553, the unfortunate Sir Hugh Willoughby, being closed in by the ice and forced to winter on the coast of Lapland, was frozen to death, with all his crew. Richard Chancellor, who accompanied this expedition, succeeded in reaching Archangel, and began to trade with the Russians. On a second voyage he took with him a sailor named Burrough, who saw at least a part of the southern and western shores of Nova Zembla; but, from the discovery of that island till the year 1B33, not one of the many navigators who visited the northern seas were able to approach its eastern coasts, with the exception of Rossmyssloff, who, about a hundred years since, advanced a little way beyond the straits which divide the islands; and of Loshkin, the walrus-fisher, to whom tradition attributes the discovery of the entire eastern coast, but the date of whose discovery was entirely unknown. Early in the present century five expeditions, dispatched by the Russian Government to survey the eastern coasts and Nova Zembla, all failed in their mission. The attempt, so often frustrated, was afterwards abandoned, and would probably have never again been attempted had not the lucky activity of private enterprise stepped in at a lucky conjuncture to renew it.

A merchant of Archangel, named Brandt, formed, in 1832, the plan of restoring the ancient trade along the northern coast, from the White Sea to the Gulf of Oby,